“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen here.”— Kay Duffy, owner of the Pet Adoption Fund

Sometimes you hear about a story and think “no way.” Then you talk to all the people involved and you find yourself thinking “sure, why not?”

This is one of those stories.

Last year I wrote a column about a 7-year-old dog named Tuffy serving life over at a private, “no-kill” shelter in Canoga Park.

He had been dropped off there more than four years earlier by an Asian woman going through some personal family problems. She just couldn’t keep him anymore.

She asked Kay Duffy, who runs the Pet Adoption Fund, to find Tuffy – a Korean Jindo dog – a good home.

“Some people drop off their dog and walk away without a backward glance,” Duffy said this week. “This woman looked back and she was crying. You could tell she really loved that dog.”

The dog must have loved her, too, because he went into a deep funk no one at the shelter had ever seen before. People read the column and wanted to adopt him. Tuffy made it clear he didn’t want to be adopted. He was waiting for someone else.

“That dog just turned the world off,” Duffy said. “He wanted no part of it. We tried everything we could to get him to respond, but nothing worked. He just shut down.”

Last Sunday, Duffy was leaving the kennel with one of her volunteers, Sue Waterman, when the phone rang.

The caller said she was Chae Weinberger, the woman who had left Tuffy at the shelter more than four years earlier.

Her family problems had been resolved and one of her children had been on the Internet looking for Jindo dogs, hoping to find their old family pet.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw a dog that looked just like him, and it was named Tuffy,” 14-year-old Jacob Weinberger said Friday. “That was our dog. What are the odds?”

Long, real long. His mother couldn’t believe it, either. After all these years surely someone had come along and adopted Tuffy, a good looking, healthy dog.

There was no way she could have known he was waiting for only one person to come back and parole him out of this “no kill” shelter.

Duffy told Chae to come by the shelter on Monday. Then, because she could not remember what the woman looked like after so many years, Duffy asked her a question only Chae could answer.

“Did you leave anything behind when you dropped Tuffy off that day?” Duffy asked

“Yes, a donation check for $1,000,” Chae said.

That was good enough for Duffy. When you run a “no kill” shelter for hundreds of dogs and cats that operates on small donations, you don’t see too many $1,000 checks.

The reunion was set for 3 p.m. Monday. What happened next no one saw coming.

“We brought Tuffy out to see her and nothing, no recognition at all,” Duffy said. “I even asked her for a piece of clothing thinking Tuffy would remember her smell.

“He just looked at me like `why are you putting this in front of my face?’ ”

Chae began to cry. She had raised Tuffy from a two-week-old puppy. Surely he would remember her, even after four years.

But he just sat there, head down, still in his deep funk.

“Why don’t you speak to him in Korean?” Brian Weinberger asked his wife.

For the first few years, Chae had always spoken Korean around the house because her sister lived with her and didn’t speak English.

“When he was bad or good, or when we were just cuddling, I’d speak to Tuffy only in Korean, too,” Chae said.

Duffy said she’s seen a lot of amazing things in 40 years of rescuing animals, but nothing like this.

“Tuffy suddenly got up and began running back and forth on the patio, his ears up, his tail wagging,” she said.

“I’ve never seen such joy in an animal. It was like he was saying `They’re here, they’re here.’ He practically jumped in her arms.”

Brian smiled, watching his wife and three children kneel down and give Tuffy hugs and kisses – the dog loving every one of them.

“Well, it does make sense,” the attorney said, writing the Pet Adoption Fund – 818-340-1186 – another $1,000 donation check.

“He is a Korean dog.”

Tuffy Weinberger had served 4½ years of a life sentence, and he was finally going home.

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